Is there a CMS that doesn't hinder design?

[Darren]

Hi there,

As I said a while back, I'm working on my own personal site.

After experimenting with some CMSs such as Joomla, I've found that you really have to integrate your site into the CMS, and not vice versa.

I can make a great website using Dreamweaver and Photoshop, etc. without a CMS.

But then when I'm using a CMS I find it limits what I can do because I'm more or less designing a template rather than designing a site.

Any recommendations?

[alvo]

The point of a CMS is that you are separating content from design, which means the pages are built from a template (or templates) and the content stored separately in a database. If you want all your pages to be different, then a CMS isn't for you as you would have to design an individual template for each page and if you're going to do that, then building static pages makes more sense. Some people have the mistaken idea that every page of a site using a CMS has to use the same template, but that's not the case. Most will let you assign a specific template to any particular page so one section, for instance, can look different than another.